Aleph One/SDL

General information

What is Aleph One/SDL?

Aleph One is an Open Source
3D first-person shooter game, based on the game
Marathon 2 by
Bungie Software. It supports, but
doesn't require, OpenGL for rendering. Aleph One was originally a Mac-only
game, but there is now a cross-platform version based on the
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library,
that should in theory run on all systems supported by SDL (Linux, BeOS,
Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, IRIX, *BSD, and others). Except for a few minor
things, the port is complete and playable.

Required libraries

Installing And Playing Aleph One/SDL

The installation of Aleph One/SDL consists of two steps:

Installing the Aleph One/SDL program

Installing Marathon data files

1. Installing the program

From a binary package

Unix: If you are running Linux/i386 with XFree86 4.0
and OpenGL you can download and install the binary RPM (you will also
need to install at least one of the AlephOne-M1A1,
AlephOne-Marathon2 or AlephOne-Infinity RPMs).
Otherwise, you have to compile Aleph One/SDL from the source (see the
next section). In both cases, you have to have SDL >= 1.2.0 installed.Note: If you are getting a message like

while installing the RPM, try installing again with the
--nodeps option. If this is the only failed dependency and
you have OpenGL installed, the program should work.

Compiling from source

You will need to have the SDL library installed. Aleph One requires at
least SDL 1.2.0. Note that if you didn't install SDL from source, you will
also have to install the SDL-devel package.

Download the Aleph One/SDL source tarball, or get the source from GitHub.

Under Unix, install Aleph One as follows:

$ ./configure
$ make
[become root]
# make install

Under BeOS, do this instead:

$ make -f Makefile.BeOS install

This will compile the source and create a directory AlephOne
in your home directory that contains the AlephOne
application and some data files.

2. Installing the data files

To play Aleph One, you will also need Marathon scenario (graphics, sound
and map) data files. For your convenience, I've created archives containing
the data files from the now freely available Marathon (M1A1), Marathon 2 and
Marathon Infinity scenarios, converted to the formats needed by the SDL
version of Aleph One.

Unix: Either download and install at least one of the
AlephOne-M1A1, AlephOne-Marathon2 or
AlephOne-Infinity RPM packages, or download one of the
AlephOne-M1A1-1.0.tar.gz, AlephOne-Marathon2-1.0.tar.gz
or AlephOne-Infinity-1.0.tar.gz tarballs and unexpand it to
/usr/local/share/AlephOne/.

BeOS: Download one of the
AlephOne-M1A1-1.0.tar.gz,
AlephOne-Marathon2-1.0.tar.gz or
AlephOne-Infinity-1.0.tar.gz tarballs and unexpand it to
the same directory as the AlephOne application.

The packages contain the files Images, Map,
Map.resources, Music, Shapes,
Sounds, some scripts, and the respective instruction manual
in PDF format (from the original Mac version).

Playing Aleph One

First, be sure to read the README file that comes with Aleph One/SDL.

Unix: If you have installed the Marathon, Marathon 2,
or Marathon Infinity scenario, type

$ alephone-m1a1

for M1A1, or

$ alephone-marathon2

for Marathon 2, or

$ alephone-infinity

for Marathon Infinity, to start the game. If you don't have
hardware-accelerated OpenGL, you will get better performance by
specifying the -g option. If this causes corrupted
graphics (red screen), you should also specify the -m
option.

BeOS: Double-click the AlephOne application.

How you can help

If you are serious about developing for Aleph One, you should subscribe to
the
marathon-devel mailing list. If you have only small patches for the SDL
version, you can send them directly to me.

But wait, there's more! Up to now, Marathon has mostly been a Mac-only
thing, and nearly all the scenarios, tools, graphics etc. made by the
Marathon community only run on Mac OS. This is where you come in. We need
cross-platform

Level editors

Physics model editors

Save game editors

Tools for editing the Shapes, Sounds and Images files

Tools for merging levels into scenarios and for splitting them

Maybe an on-line archive of levels and scenarios that have been
converted to a format readily usable with Aleph One/SDL (instead
of BinHexed StuffIt archives containing dual-forked Mac files, as
nearly all files on the
Marathon HyperArchive are).

If you're interested in or already working on one of the above items, feel
free to contact me and I will add a link to your project's page.

Bug reports and feature requests

Bug reports and feature requests can be submitted via the
bug tracker
on GitHub.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Aleph One?

Aleph One is the Open Source version of Marathon 2.

What is Marathon?

Marathon is a three-part
game series published by
Bungie Software, consisting of
Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity.
They are first-person shooter puzzle games with Doom-like graphics, set in
a scifi universe dominated by deviant computer AIs and (unlike Doom or Quake)
a well thought out plot.
The original Marathon game was released in December 1994. With the exception
of Marathon 2, which was also available for Windows 95, all Marathon games
have only been released for Mac OS.

Open Source?

On January 17, 2000, Bungie Software released the source code of the Mac OS
version of Marathon 2 under the terms of the
GNU General Public License. Since then the game has been enhanced and
extended, under the name of "Aleph One", by a team of developers on the
Internet. Two of the biggest improvements to the game so far are the addition
of OpenGL rendering and a built-in scripting language.

What is "Aleph One/SDL"?

Aleph One was originally a Mac-only project. Later, a cross-platform
version based on the SDL library has been developed. This version runs on
Linux, *BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, and eventually other systems supported
by SDL.

What is SDL?

The Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
library is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide easy and
consistant access to graphics, sound, and user input, under a large number
of operating systems. It is used by many popular games, most notably by
most of the games published by Loki Entertainment.